Systems which receive broadcast signals and generate a display signal for a television set are known as set-top boxes, whether they are actually on top of a television set or any other location outside or within the television set itself. Set-top boxes are currently available for receiving digital satellite television broadcast, cable television broadcast, community antenna service, dial up, cable, or DSL Internet service, or combinations thereof.
A set-top box formerly sold under the trademark WebTV and now sold as MSN TV viewer, and a set-top box made by Thomson and sold under the trademark DirecTV both have web browsers for receiving web pages over the internet and generating display signals causing the web pages to be displayed on television screens.
Conventional web browsers for use with conventional computer monitors have “favorites,” “favorite places,” and “bookmarks,” functions that allow a user to save a page, identified in the memory as a URL, and also have “history” function that automatically saves recently accessed (“visited”) web pages in the form of a URL in a register. The user can set the history function at different levels, depending on how much memory the user wishes to allocate to such function. Conventional web browsers also have a “text size” setting wherein a user can select from different text size options, for example smallest, small, normal, larger, larger, or largest text sizes, which function to increase or decrease the text size in a web page compared to the size included in the original web page design. In this example, smallest may correspond to 50% of the original size, small may correspond to 75%, normal to 100%, large to 125%, and largest to 150%. After the user changes the text size selection, all web pages visited will be displayed with the corresponding reduction or increase of text size versus the size designed into the page.
For web browsers generated by set-top boxes for viewing on television screens, the text size option and a graphics size option are usually presented so that the user can increase or decrease the graphics size versus the original design in the page. Other viewing options such as color may also be available in certain browsers.
Since television screens usually have lower resolution than computer monitors, and since the user is usually further from the television screen than from a computer monitor, it is more likely that a user using a web browser displayed on a television will select the increase text size and/or increase graphics size options to make some pages readable. For some pages, the user may have to increase the text size by 125%, and for other web pages, a different scaling ratio may be better.
Since there is no uniformity among web page designs and formats, a set-top box user may have to change text, graphics, and other options very frequently, sometimes for each viewed page. Although web browsers for television screens are generally user-friendly for changing these options because they are used so frequently, the constant readjustment of such options requires extra steps and extra time.
Very similar problems occur with other apparatus having display screens with lower resolution than computer monitors have, for example cell phones and personal data assistants.
Others have attempted to address the problem of text size on displays other than computer screens, for example a current web site, HTTP://www.DynaLab.com, offers Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) Bitmap, TrueType, ATM, and Postscript fonts for Windows, Macintosh, Unix and Linux platforms which can be used on a variety of devices, from computers to cellular phones.
However, no one has solved the problem of the need to constantly readjust text, graphics, and other options for each viewed web page.
It is an object of the present invention to reduce the need to repeat adjustment of viewing options for web sites that are revisited.